iPhone Apps With No Ads and No Tracking

"No ads" is one of the least reliable phrases on the App Store, because it means at least four different things and the store listing rarely tells you which one you're getting. This page explains how to tell them apart, then publishes the complete list of network requests each of our six apps makes so you can check ours yourself.

The four things "no ads" can mean

Ranked from strongest to weakest, a claim of "no ads" usually turns out to be one of these:

1. No advertising code at all. The app contains no ad SDK, so there is nothing that could ever show an ad, in any tier, in any future configuration short of a new release.
2. No forced ads, but rewarded video exists. Nothing interrupts you, but there is a button that plays an ad for currency, lives, or hints. The ad SDK is present, the ad network still gets a device signal, and — more importantly — the game's economy has been tuned around the assumption that you'll watch.
3. Ads removable by purchase. The ad SDK ships to everyone; paying flips a flag. Free users are the product.
4. No ads in this tier. The wording is doing quiet work. Read it twice.

All six Solutionflare apps are the first kind. There is no advertising SDK compiled into any of them, so there is no rewarded video, no interstitial, no banner, and no sponsored placement — and nothing in any app can be unlocked by watching something. As of August 2026 this is checkable in each app's dependency manifest, and it holds for the free tiers as well as the paid ones.

How to verify any app's claims before you install it

You don't have to take a marketing page's word for it, including this one. Three checks take about two minutes:

• Read the App Store privacy label, not the description. Scroll to "App Privacy". "Data Not Collected" is a strong signal. "Data Used to Track You" is a disqualifying one if tracking is what you're avoiding.
• Look for the tracking prompt. An app that asks "Allow to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites?" has requested the advertising identifier. No Solutionflare app has ever shown that prompt, because none of them requests it.
• Turn on App Privacy Report. In iOS, Settings → Privacy & Security → App Privacy Report shows every domain each app actually contacted. This is the check that can't be marketed around. Run it on anything you're unsure about.

Every network request our apps make

This is the whole list, per app. Anything not in this table does not happen.

Swipe the table sideways to see every column.

What we do collect, stated plainly

Claiming zero would be easier and slightly false, so here is the actual answer.

• RevenueCat, for purchases only. It is the single third-party SDK in any of our apps, and it exists to validate and restore App Store purchases under an anonymous, app-generated identifier. It receives no name, email, or content. Dogear doesn't even include it, because Dogear has nothing to sell.
• Purchase history, where a paid tier exists. Pentire's App Store privacy label, for example, declares exactly one collected data type: Purchase History, not linked to your identity and not used for tracking.
• Apple sees what Apple sees. Downloads and purchases go through the App Store. We get Apple's standard aggregate sales reporting, which is not per-person behaviour and is not something any developer can switch off.

And the part most privacy pages leave out

Our privacy policies reserve the right to add limited, anonymous, aggregated diagnostics in a future release — crash counts and the like. None exists today in any app. If it ever ships, the App Store privacy labels and the policies change first, it would never include your photos, text, sleep data, or messages, and it would never be used for advertising or tracking. We would rather write that sentence than promise "never" and quietly revise it later.

Why we build this way

An ad SDK is not a neutral add-on. It shapes the product: it wants sessions rather than outcomes, it needs a natural interruption point, and it makes the failure state — running out of hints, losing a life, hitting a wall — commercially useful. Once that incentive is inside the codebase, it argues for itself in every design meeting.

Analytics has a milder version of the same problem, plus a data-handling obligation nobody actually wants. We would rather ship apps that don't require us to be trustworthy with your behavioural data, because we don't have any. The trade is that we find out what's wrong from support email instead of a dashboard, which is slower and occasionally embarrassing, and worth it.

Every paid app also has a one-time purchase option, which is the other half of the same idea: see how our pricing works.

Frequently asked questions

Are there really no ads in any Solutionflare app?

Yes. As of August 2026, none of the six apps contains an advertising SDK of any kind. That means no banners, no interstitials, no rewarded video, and no sponsored content, in free tiers as well as paid ones. Because there is no ad code compiled in, there is also nothing that could be enabled by a server-side flag.

Do Solutionflare apps track me across other apps and websites?

No. None of them requests the advertising identifier (IDFA), which is why none of them has ever shown you an App Tracking Transparency prompt. Pentire's privacy manifest, for example, declares tracking as false with an empty tracking-domains list, and Rouse's does the same.

Do the apps collect analytics about how I use them?

No. There is no third-party analytics, attribution, or crash-reporting SDK in any of the six, and no in-app event logging. We cannot see which features you use, which puzzles you play, what you read, or for how long.

What is RevenueCat and why is it in the apps?

RevenueCat is a service that validates and restores App Store purchases. It is the only third-party SDK in any Solutionflare app, it is configured with anonymous app-generated identifiers, and it receives no name, email, or content. Dogear does not include it at all, because Dogear has no purchases.

What is the settings file the apps download at launch?

A small static file hosted on the app's own marketing site, used for things like a maintenance notice or a store link. It is identical for every install, carries no query parameters and no identifiers, and the app falls back to bundled defaults when it can't be reached. Nothing about you is sent in order to fetch it.

How can I check these claims myself?

Turn on App Privacy Report in iOS Settings under Privacy & Security, then use the app normally. It lists every domain each app contacted. You can also read the App Store privacy label for each app, and note that none of them ever shows a tracking permission prompt.

Will Solutionflare start collecting data later?

Our privacy policies reserve the right to add limited, anonymous, aggregated diagnostics in a future release. Nothing like that exists in any app today. If it ever ships, the privacy policies and App Store privacy labels change before that version does, and it would never include your photos, messages, reading text, or health data, and would never be used for advertising or tracking.

Which Solutionflare app collects the least?

Dogear. It has no purchases, so it contains no third-party SDK at all, and its App Store privacy label is “Data Not Collected”. Its only network request is the anonymous static settings file every app fetches at launch.